The map changed.
ON THE COUNCIL’S Draft Central City Recovery Plan, presented to the public in December 2011, the Avon Loop had appeared as a special feature in a proposed riverside park. With a modest budget of $40.5 million, the Papawai Otakaro/Avon River Project would ‘bring life and health to the waters of Christchurch and Otakaro’, with flood mitigation, improved water quality, riparian plantings and cycle paths along the banks. Arrows on the graphic illustrating the proposal pointed out the town hall, the central library and there, in the top north-east corner, linked to the city centre by a cycleway and footpath, was ‘The Avon Loop. Area of character housing defined by small scale cottage style.’
That picture changed after February’s quake.
In June 2011, Cabinet granted a power to act to a group of ministers who would then ‘take decisions on matters relating to Canterbury land damage and remediation issues’. It was those ministers — Gerry Brownlee (earthquake recovery), Bill English (finance) and Simon Power (associate finance) — who would write the next chapter in the story of the Avon Loop.
In the newly colour-coded city, of Red, Green, Orange and White, on 23 June the Loop was zoned Orange. Further geotechnical work would be required before a final zoning could be decided. The area could eventually be zoned Green, which would mean that homes could be repaired by their owners and life could continue more or less as before. Or it might be zoned Red, meaning purchase by the government, demolition, land clearance, a new home elsewhere.
Some people had already left, their houses too damaged, their nerves too shattered to remain. On Bangor Street a firewall had collapsed, burying a child’s bed in bricks. The family packed what they could retrieve and departed for the safety of Timaru. Some houses remained empty, still with cups on a table, beds unmade, their gardens reverting to a tangle of overgrown roses and long grass.
But not all houses in the Loop had suffered extensive damage. Only 54 per cent were officially considered in need of a total rebuild. Some had cracks or a broken chimney or a wobbly place on the floor where the piles had sunk, but remained habitable. One house, in fact, was brand new. Its owners, Elsie Locke’s daughter Alison and her partner Mike Moss, were in the process of building a new home on the footprint of the old cottage when the September quake struck. Since it sustained no damage, they went on and completed it in the months that followed. February’s shock left it largely unscathed. They remained living in the Loop.
Others stayed because rentals in the city were rocketing or because they wished to protect their homes from looting. There was a lot of that in red-zoned areas. One friend found her front gate — a wrought-iron gate made for their driveway, one she would know anywhere from years of going in and going out — in a salvage yard in Dallington. Another came across her French doors on TradeMe. One glanced out his window to see men in orange vests busily loading his rockery onto a ute. Some stayed because they had a dog and it was hard to find a rental that would accept pets. And others simply because the sun still shines onto the verandah and it might all work out: the neighbourhood might yet be zoned Green.
By 29 February 2012 there is another map of the Avon Loop. It has been prepared for EQC by environmental and engineering company Tonkin and Taylor to depict land damage across the city, based on observations made by EQC’s rapid assessment teams after the 22 February quake. This map uses another palette: some parts are blue, signifying that the teams could see ‘no observable ground cracking or ejected liquefied material’. Green signifies minor cracking, two shades of mustard yellow minor or major ‘quantities of ejected material but no lateral spreading’. A lighter shade of crimson means ‘moderate to major lateral spreading or large quantities of ejected material’, while the deepest crimson is reserved for ‘severe lateral spreading’ and a lot of ejected silt.
On this new map washes of blue and mustard cover most of the city, through which the river winds like a punctured artery, bleeding crimson over residential areas in Aranui, Bexley, Avonside and the manicured lawns of Fendalton. Factsheets give a more detailed picture, suburb by suburb.
Factsheet 7 shows the Avon Loop. A crimson strip runs along the riverbank from the bridge on Kilmore Street. It has a neat edge, following precisely the lines of existing streets and individual property boundaries. It stops abruptly at Willow Street. None of the properties here, it seems, are as badly damaged as the properties across the back fence that face onto Oxford Terrace and the river. The little cottages lining Rees Street are tinted mustard yellow. The rich man’s house on Bangor Street stands alongside its neighbours on land tinted crimson.
There are white spaces, too, that the engineers have not mapped, for they are commercial premises and therefore beyond the scope of EQC regulation. The clubrooms, the Holiday Inn hotel, the whole length of the riverbank leading from the Loop into the central city are blank. The land there might conceivably be as damaged by lateral spread, slumpage or liquefaction. Certainly the road outside the hotel is as creviced as anywhere beneath that crimson stain. Its fine big picture windows are as cracked, its walls as skewed, the plaster Doric columns along its frontage tilting at wonky, drunken angles. But this is not translated to Factsheet 7, which is designed not for commercial owners but to ‘communicate information that may be relevant to residential landclaims under the Earthquake Commission Act of 1993’.
This map forms the basis on which the three ministers will make their final zoning decisions. On 21 March 2012, they meet to decide the fate of orange-zoned sections of Richmond South, Linwood and the area, including the Loop, which is now referred to, somewhat confusingly, as Central City South. Their decisions will affect 252 homes, seventy-nine of which stand in the Loop.
It all comes down to a simple formula recorded in the documents used at the meeting:
Add together the cost of land reinstatement to
its pre-September 2010 condition, plus the
cost of betterment — strengthening the land
or raising it above flood levels. Add the cost
of infrastructure replacement.
Subtract the cost of decommissioning
infrastructure and grassing the resulting site.
If the cost of the above exceeds the improve-
ment in the value of the damaged land,
remediation is not cost-effective. But if the cost
of the above is less than the improvement in
the value of the damaged land, remediation
may be cost-effective.
The problem for the Loop, as for other houses along the leafy riverside to the east, is that premium placed on riverfront property. The houses of the Loop are less valuable than the land they stand on.
The proposal is presented to the ministers in a simple yes/no format. Circle one. Do the ministers agree ‘that 78 properties in the Central City South as indicated in the map attached to Appendix 2 be rezoned Red’?
Yes, says the minister of earthquake recovery. Yes, says the minister of finance. Yes, says the associate minister of finance.
Then follows a curious little anomaly. Do the ministers agree ‘that 1 residential property in Central City South should be rezoned Green?’ Yes, say the ministers once more. The rich man’s house on Bangor Street is not to suffer the same fate as its neighbours. Tonkin and Taylor personnel have advised that this house has ‘experienced significantly less damage than the remainder of the Central City South Orange Zone’ and can be repaired ‘on an individual basis following normal insurance process’.
Red zoning, despite its hard and fast exterior, turns out to be a discretionary process, perhaps as legally unstable as the land it attempts to define. It is challenged through the courts, in 2013 for example, by a group calling themselves the Quake Outcasts, owners of undeveloped land that could not be insured pre-quake and was therefore unqualified to receive the government’s payout when it was zoned Red. They argue that the zoning was not implemented in accordance with the CERA Act and was therefore unlawful, and the judge a
t the High Court largely agreed.
The prime minister is unimpressed with the decision. ‘One option is the government says, “Thanks very much. It’s been a lot of fun. If you don’t like the offer, that’s where it’s at.”’ And CERA plans to challenge the decision.
Nevertheless, a crack has opened. The zoning decisions may not be as solid as they first appeared.
An independent review of EQC’s performance published in October 2013 casts further doubt. The ministers’ decisions were based on the findings of ‘EQC rapid assessments completed after the 22 February 2011 earthquakes’.
The business of assessment had proven highly profitable, especially for EQC’s contracted company, Gallagher Bassett Services, and its associate, another Queensland-based company, Verifact. These two companies were the rebuild’s ‘biggest winners’, according to a Press article that analysed figures supplied by EQC to Parliament’s finance and expenditure select committee in August 2013. In the two years ending June 2011 and 2012, EQC paid the companies a combined total of $90, 339, 468. GBS was paid $41,145,343 for claims-processing and loss-adjusting services, while Verifact received $49,194,125 for loss-adjusting and estimating services. Verifact was the largest supplier of field inspectors, providing 210 staff to EQC between October 2010 and December 2011, at an average cost of $234,257 per person, including disbursements. By contrast, Tonkin and Taylor, who prepared the geotechnical maps on which the zoning decisions were based, was paid a mere $23.3 million for the same period.
But the October review reported in the The Press criticises some of those assessment teams. ‘A number of assessors provided by Verifact … were either physically unsuitable for the job or lacked the necessary skills, including those of basic numeracy. Many assessors and estimators appear to lack knowledge of EQC cover, the 1993 Act, building code or repair strategies even after induction and training … Effective performance management did not appear to be part of EQC culture, with the focus on quantity rather than quality.’
So that 54 per cent figure might represent a sound and skilled assessment of the damage sustained to land and homes in the Avon Loop.
On the other hand, it might not.
THE AVON LOOP IS ZONED RED. Just over 100 days later, CERA and the CCDU produce their blueprint. A bound and illustrated paper plan fills in detail not visible on the screen. ‘Listen to the people,’ reads the title page. ‘Whakarongo ki te Tangata … with strong hearts and strong minds, we can build a better city for us and our children after us.’
At first glance the new plan looks exactly like the council’s draft, but on closer inspection there are differences. In the upper north-eastern corner, where there had been the ‘Area of character housing’ as a special feature on a bike ride along the riverside park, there is a blank: a pallid square intersected by the phantoms of Bangor Street and Oxford Terrace. White rectangles mark the presence of the clubrooms, the Holiday Inn and the houses on the streets immediately adjacent and the rich man’s house by the river. Otherwise, a blank, marked with an ‘H’ for ‘Possible Future Park’.
CERA spells out what the zoning means to those whose homes are to be erased. At meetings, the CEO Roger Sutton explains that red zoning is necessary because of significant area-wide land damage, the uncertainty of engineering solutions to remedy that damage, and the fact that repair will be protracted and disruptive. Eighteen months or more. Your house may have suffered little damage but the land beneath it is frail. There is risk of serious harm in future quakes. Your health and well-being are CERA’s priority.
‘But what if we don’t mind waiting another eighteen months?’ asks a homeowner. ‘We’ve already waited that long. We can wait a little longer.’ If you wait, says the CEO, you will likely find yourself without sewerage, water or postal delivery. They will be disconnected. And should you change your mind in the future and decide to sell, you will have to sell at the current market value, which will be less than the government’s offer.
‘And what if my land is remediated and it becomes possible to build on it once more?’ asks a landowner. ‘Could we have first right of purchase at a reasonable price?’ No, says Mr Sutton. You can’t.
The zoning documents supply further detail. Land repairs in the Avon Loop are ‘expected to be required under parts of Oxford Terrace and Fitzgerald Avenue’, along the banks of the river. They are ‘estimated to take 18 months to complete, but once completed the land would be classified as TC3’, meaning that it will then be strong enough that ‘property owners [can then] work through the normal insurance process for repairs and rebuilding’.
But not the property owners who have until now made the Loop their home. They will have moved elsewhere, to a house or unit in another suburb, to Nelson and Timaru and Otaki and Rangiora. Some will have taken a souvenir: a lemon tree, some spring bulbs, the letterbox, a strip of verandah lace. Their houses stay on for a while among buddleia and long grass, the walls are tagged.
Elsewhere in the city, such residential Red Zone areas are used by the police for exercises in tactical training. Those empty homes, the force’s tactical commander says, ‘provide a fantastic opportunity’ for training in a ‘realistic environment’, using ‘everything but real bullets and real blood’. In the Loop it is not the police who make use of the environment but the girls from Manchester Street, whose brothels and former haunts have been placed off limits. They turn up after dark with their clients. Condoms like limp white worms lie discarded in courtyards. A family returning to visit their former home find the windows gaping and a pink dildo on the living room floor. The gap between the River Carnivals and Community Crumbles, and raw brutality, seems very slight.
And one morning, the wire cordons go up, the trucks and diggers arrive, the roof of the house is lifted away, the walls are consumed and sometimes the people who used to live there come to watch, as if this place of wood and corrugate were a relative, someone they loved. Then the trees are torn up, the driveway and all trace of habitation.
Bizarrely, at this stage, while the Red Zone houses are falling like ninepins, CERA’s Roger Sutton suggests that some might be preserved.
On 25 August 2013, after touring the Red Zone with some visiting officials, he announces a new plan to The Press. ‘We have to tell these people’s stories,’ he says. ‘One house we went into, there was not a photo of Betty [the presumed homeowner], there was no telling of her story. We have to make sure we keep some of those houses and tell some of those stories. What happened to Betty on that day? How long was it before someone came along and took her somewhere else to sleep? Where is she living now? How hard was it to find another place? Is she happy? We have to tell those stories.’
Evidently, CERA is looking for homes with some damage that can be made stable and preserved. ‘We’re onto that at the moment. Which houses will we save, and which stories will we tell?’
A CERA staff officer immediately signals caution and that the idea ‘is purely a concept and Roger has had only a very preliminary discussion with CERA staff’.
It’s unsettling. Homes are like babies: everyone believes theirs to be the most beautiful. It’s natural to want your home to be the one chosen for preservation, but the idea seems to fade, along with the verandahs and lemon trees.
THROUGH ALL THIS, some people cling on. Donna, for instance, who until October 2013 remains in her house on the corner of Bangor Street and Oxford Terrace with her husband Lex and their two dogs, Niko and Zeus. A white-painted, double-bay villa, verandah, spacious hallway hung with paintings. One is a large oil, dating from before the quakes, in which the city’s old buildings hover like something dreamt. Donna loves old buildings, their story and their form. She is an artist, trained originally as a ticket writer but now working in many mediums. No. 406 Oxford Terrace has been their home for twenty-four years, since the day she spotted the place in a real estate magazine.
She was pregnant and they were looking for a house, ‘a cute house somewhere’, not necessarily in the Loop. ‘We didn’t kno
w anything then about the Loop. It was 1989. It wasn’t specially trendy to live in the central city.’ But that day, they walked in and fell in love. They bought it that afternoon.
They raised two sons there. ‘Quite soon after we got here, Jack Locke came over and said, “When you have the baby, come to playgroup.” That’s where I met the other mothers.’ She reels off a long list of their names, and those of others she came to know within the Loop: Jenny and Mervyn, Michelle, Cathleen, Doug and Barbara, Siobhan, Alison and Mike and Robin. She mentions midwinter dinners at the Community Cottage, markets in Walnut Tree Park, Christmas parties for the kids at the playgroup. ‘Elsie said, “When you live here you can have as much or as little to do with the community as you like.” After the quake it was common to hear people say that they had finally met their neighbours, but we already knew each other.’
At the time of the first quake, Donna and Lex were renovating the kitchen and in the midst of painting. The instant is marked by a kind of inadvertent timeline above the kitchen door, where sisal brown gives way to white undercoat. ‘I stopped because there were cracks everywhere.’
The February quake caused further damage. It struck with force, buckling floors and walls and sending Niko off, barking, out the door. She ran after him. The dog raced along Oxford Terrace and into a house where she found him beside one of their neighbours, who lay dying and being revived as his pacemaker switched into action, over and over, while the ceiling overhead flexed dangerously, threatening total collapse. Donna dragged two chairs to form a hasty shelter where she and Niko, with his big husky body and brown eyes, protected their neighbour until someone knocked on the door and they were able to carry him out onto a mattress on the deck. There’s a medal awarded by the mayor and council for bravery. Donna’s name is on it, and though dogs were not given such awards, she had the engraver add Niko’s name beneath her own.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 15